Joanna Scanlan

It's the final episode of Jo Brand's blacker-than-black comedy set on an NHS geriatric ward, and what a missed opportunity it has proven: only three episodes long and ferreted away on BBC4. Tonight, Brand's nurse Kim has to partake in a jargon-strewn 'conflict resolution strategy' after her bawdy humour hits a sensitive target, Den and Dr Pippa tie themselves in knots over who exactly has won the raffle prize (a hamper), and the stool research continues. Bleak but brilliant.

Getting On gets better. Somehow Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine have created a comedy about a modern NHS ward that is piercingly weird, coldly plausible, heartbreaking and hilarious. This week, a foul-mouthed racist OAP went on the rampage, delivering a bloody nose to the new male matron, who desperately tried to remember his stay-calm management training module as his nose bled.

The humour in Getting On is stealthy: the harassed doctor searched for her stool samples, hustled pathetically for a car-parking space and saw not that many patients - then looked at her lined face in the toilet and wondered where the years had gone. This moving reverie was interrupted by the head nurse rapping on the door, insisting that it should never be locked. The doctor she fancied, played by The Thick of It's Peter Capaldi (who also directs Getting On), looked past her at a much younger model. The comedy in Getting On is as wincing as The Thick of It, with the added pathos of near-death patients wheezing their last. Or not, as happened this week, with the sudden, vexing recovery of one.

TV Review: Getting On

In the beginning I thought it was trying to hard to be quirky and sardonic, but as the episode wore on and settled down, it was a real treat to watch.

Ward B4 is a backwater of the NHS, a place where old folks go to wither away and where the staff also look as though they have seen their best years. From this unremarkable setting, the three writer-actors - Jo Brand, Vicki Pepperdine and Joanna Scanlan - have created a gem of a comedy. They never overplay their hand, generally stay one step ahead and know that while a note of pathos is fine it still has to be funny. In this second episode, sister Den and nurse Kim have an abusive patient to deal with.

Getting On: Joanna Scanlan ponders playing Nurse

Joanna Scanlan - who you may recognise as The Thick of It's long-suffering Terri, stars as Sister Den Flixter in BBC Four's new comic drama Getting On, which she co-wrote. Den is a nurse, a role that Joanna has some familiarity with, as she explains.

Set in a geriatric ward, naturalistically performed and filmed in a spartan, documentary style, Getting On might not sound the most inviting of comedies. Do not be misled.

Written by and starring Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine, Getting On is a gem of a show that somehow succeeds in being by turns cynical, compassionate, depressing and life-affirming. And funny. Did I mention funny?

It's a struggle for the Getting On nurses - to decide if they can take a dead patient's cake

Curiously, it reminded me of Dinnerladies, which Victoria Wood wanted shot as this is: naturalistically. It is very female and unfazed by death.

The opening line of a comedy is crucial in setting the tone - it lets you know where the writers are coming from. So when Getting On dumped "there's a s*** on the chair" on us as an introductory gambit, it was clear this wasn't going to be an easy ride. That the words were squeezed from the lugubrious gob of Jo Brand, resplendent in nurse's uniform, only piled on the agony.

Yet I can't remember the last time I howled so loudly. Cut from the same downbeat naturalistic cloth as The Royle Family and The Office, Getting On mines the misery of a hospital geriatric ward for bleak laughs. Yet for all its pot-shotting at NHS bureaucracy and patronising consultants, there's a heartening thread of humanity that stitches this mordant little gem together.

You don't need to have spent any time in geriatric wards to get Getting On but possibly it helps. Director Peter Capaldi (taking time out from political jiggery pokery in Torchwood and The Thick Of It) gets the feel of washed-out light and weary resignation spot on; even the corridors feel like they're shrugging their shoulders and doing all they can to keep from falling over.

But where Getting On really scores is with the performances of its central trio of writer/actors. Brand is matched every cynical sigh of the way by Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine as the lap dancer-booted sister and the stool-obsessed consultant ('what type is it?' 'I'd say type four: snake') around whom Getting On revolves in increasingly desperate circles. One heartbreaking, hilarious scene summed up. An Asian woman had been muttering away in her bed for an age and finally the nurses got a translation over the phone. 'What's she saying?' 'I want to die, please kill me.' 'Put it in her notes.'

The New Statesman Review

It made me laugh out loud twice, which is more than can be said for virtually all the new comedy I've seen in two years.

You really shouldn't laugh. That's what you'll keep telling yourself during the first episode of this dazzlingly low-key new comedy set in a geriatric ward.

But it's no good putting on your politically correct face and sitting there tutting, because this is a relentlessly funny, workplace comedy that is right up there with The Thick Of It or The Office.

Part of the BBC's coyly titled Grey Expectations strand about the joys of ageing, the morbid humour is as black as death itself. Produced on a budget that would barely cover hair and make-up on Ugly Betty, it's written by Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine who also star as the self-interested, bored and incompetent medical staff. To add to its credentials, it's directed by Peter Capaldi, most famous of course as The Thick Of It's explosive spin doctor Malcolm Tucker.

Brand, as everyone knows, used to be a nurse in a psychiatric hospital which must surely account for the way that every horrible detail is so ruthlessly observed. You feel you could be watching a documentary filmed by an undercover C4 researcher with a camera hidden in a bed pan.

As the patronising, brisk, and utterly ineffectual Dr Pippa Moore (obsessed tonight with a poo that has been left on a chair), Pepperdine is absolutely spot-on and instantly recognisable, while the team's joint dealings with a patient who speaks no English are toe-curlingly sublime.

But just remember, you really shouldn't laugh.